Managing religious heritage: Designing an accommodation strategy for Dutch churches

Secularisation is leading to an increasing amount of obsolete churches in the Netherlands. There is a need for decision making on which churches to preserve and how to deal with the preserved churches. Adaptively reusing these buildings can safeguard them from demolition. Adaptively reusing churches is a matter of making concessions. Every...

Risk Management in Dike Reconstruction: Risk Framework and Application

The Netherlands which means “lowlands”, constitutes an area of approximately 41,528 km2. Almost half of those areas are below the sea level. Today, more than 2,400 kilometres of dikes shields the sunken-flat land. Regular safety assessment of the dikes are constantly conducted, and the evaluation determines whether planning or dike...

Decision support framework for a sustainable waste management system in Ahmedabad, India

Rapid Urbanization has been the recent trends observed across all the countries of the globe. With the rising levels of global population, the global consumption and hence the rate of waste generation has also simultaneously increased. Hence, one of the key roles of the local municipalities is to decide, develop and maintain a waste management...

Prioritizing and selecting KPIs: An AHP-based model to evaluate the alignments among strategy business model and performance metrics

Structuring the fuzzy front end of new product development

Creative Solvers: A new creative platform originated from the analysis of creative problem solving and decision making

Both divergence and convergence are important drivers for the development of new ideas, and consequently products becoming drivers for innovation. Starting from this notion, this thesis investigates the areas of creative problem solving and decision-making, taking into account practices from new product development. Drawing inferences from...

Framework of Model-Based Health Optimization on the Electrical Power System

The advanced ageing of the electrical power network combined with the inevitable increase of renewable energy utilization and the constant increase of power consumption over the last decades call for a change in the current power network paradigm. Electrical world stakeholders have to embrace the situation and come up with methods of better...

Building on tunnels: Suggestions to improve the decision making process

Exploratory modeling: A promising method for flood risk management?

This thesis compares exploratory modeling and analysis (EMA) to other methods for analyzing uncertainty. A set of criteria to compare the performance of methods is designed. Based on two case studies the perfromance of EMA on these criteria is assessed. Based on a workshop with experts the advantages of EMA over other methods for analyzing...

Acceptable Risk Levels for Use in Hydraulic Design

This thesis contains a description of the government policies of the Netherlands and the UK with regard to flood and coastal protection and of three detailed case study analyses used in for research project 'Acceptable Risk Levels for Use in Hydraulic Design', which was carried out by HR Wallingford and was funded by the British Government. The...